


And I'll see the dark things that you all try to hide

by KidScrappy



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Grim Reapers, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Depression, Gen, Mentions of Suicide, Setting - Underwater
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-17 06:57:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11846325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KidScrappy/pseuds/KidScrappy
Summary: Almost two years after his death Oikawa Tooru walks into the Pacific Ocean to carry out the worst job this side of mortality has to offer.





	And I'll see the dark things that you all try to hide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Icie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icie/gifts).
  * Inspired by [I Won't Give In, We'll be Dead in the Eyes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5188691) by [Icie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icie/pseuds/Icie). 



> Because after a hundred times reading it is still one of my favorite stories

 

 

Almost two years after his death Oikawa Tooru walks into the Pacific Ocean to carry out the worst job this side of mortality has to offer.

 

The water is ice cold when it soaks through the bottoms of his jeans and into his shoes. He shivers, just once, savoring the moment, before shutting down all feeling in his legs. The next step he takes is smooth, like the water isn’t pushing and pulling at him in with it’s every movement. With another step he numbs the rest of his body to its resistance.

 

He skims the waves with his fingertips and briefly wonders if he should feel strange. His mentor had once told him that it took most new reapers weeks to learn to realign their body with their minds, to achieve the lack of regard for the laws of nature sometimes needed to bring down corrupted souls. He had been so surprised to see Oikawa master it with a few days.

 

The water comes up to his chin now and he takes his last breath. The key, he thought, was to not consider the body as anything other than a useful tool. Nothing more than a means to an end.

 

As the waves close in over his head he wonders when his body last felt _real_ to him.

 

*

 

It doesn’t take long at all for the light to leave him completely and when it does he wonders if it’s because of nightfall or because he has reached a depth where the sunlight doesn’t reach. He doesn’t know how far from shore he is, if it’s even possible that he has come so far in however many hours have passed since he left the beach.

 

It catches him off guard, how complete the darkness is. It’s hard to imagine what a complete lack of light looks like living in a city, in a country with a high enough population that the light pollution obscures most of the stars from view.

 

There’s still no stars now, nothing at all except a dark that weighs him down like a heavy blanket trying to suffocate him. His legs give out underneath him and he sinks to the sand like the debris around him and decides that this was probably a mistake. He’d turn around and go back to the beach if he could move at all but he’s paralyzed by something very close to fear.

 

He wonders what will happen to him if he’s never able to move from this spot again when a fish swims by that he can actually _see_. It’s an anglerfish, he remembers them from his biology textbook. It’s mouth is a mess of terrifying, needle-like teeth but, like its intended prey, it’s the little lightbulb he’s most interested in. He studies it as it passes by, not quite confident enough to reach out and touch it, and watches the light fade away in the distance.

 

When he can no longer see it he focusses his attention on his hands, willing them to glow with the same bioluminescence and watches his fingers come into view, a bright blue light now glowing along his bones. He laughs, a small panicked thing, but a laugh nonetheless. He can keep going.

 

*

 

He didn’t set out into the water with any plan, it’s impossible to know the exact location of any soul without a death note and even then there aren’t exactly addresses to follow out here, but there’s a tugging at his sternum that he can’t get rid off that’s urging him to keep moving forward.

 

It takes some time to figure out where _exactl_ y it wants him to go and it involves a lot of turning around in circles that he’s sure makes him look stupid to the fish that swim by, but at one point in his rotation it feels different. He takes a hesitant step forward and the tug becomes something less sharp and more comforting, like a friend beckoning him to come over and play games together.

 

He frowns at the comparison his own mind offered up, shaking his head as if to dislodge any memories that might come up in response, and follows whatever soul is calling out to him.

 

*

 

Oikawa’s mentor had neglected to teach him what the souls he would find underwater would be like and in the back of his mind Oikawa wishes he had bothered to ask as he faces down a distorted mess of black hurtling towards him.

 

It’s nothing at all like anything he’s had to take down before, not like souls wrecked by sickness or injury, not like the victims of easily avoidable accidents caused by drunk drivers or people too busy looking at their phones to keep an eye on the road. Nothing even like suicides gone horribly, horribly bad.

 

He swings his scythe in a wide arc that his opponent doesn’t even bother to dodge and ends up having to jump out of the reach of razor sharp claws aiming for his gut.

 

This thing is _old_ , far older than Oikawa, and it’s been existing down here, by itself in the dark, long enough to have no emotion left but a raging, cold fury. Luckily for him, that doesn’t leave it with a whole lot of strategy, and a lifetime of reading players on the other side of the net has him side-stepping and slashing, finding the gaps in its defense with relative ease until finally, with a last muffled howl, the jumbled souls dissipate into a murky cloud of ashes and slowly vanish.

 

There’s no breath to catch here, no place to lay down and recover strength he doesn’t, technically, need. The scythe disappears back into his skin and a new tugging pushes him onward.

 

*

 

The further he goes, the weirder the creatures around him get.

 

They start of similar enough to their counterparts in shallower waters that he can more or less place them, just a little smaller, faster, with more teeth. In theory, everything down here should be small, the enormous amount of pressure and the complete lack of light not conducive to growing larger than necessary. In reality certain species seem to thrive in the environment, large enough to swallow him whole and looking like an unholy combination of something from his books on prehistoric animals and the worst b-horror aliens the world has to offer.

 

He would be afraid of them if he thought they could actually hurt him, the way he is now very few things could, but only a couple even acknowledge his being there. Just like cats and crows they seem to realize he’s _other_ , something that doesn’t fit any of the categories their instinct provides, neither predator nor prey, and they leave him alone because of it.

 

If he ever resurfaces he’s adding some documentaries on deep sea creatures to his watchlist, although he doubts any would cover the monsters he’s seeing in front of him right now.

 

*

 

He stops keeping count somewhere after his fiftieth reaping, on account that it’s really hard to tell how many souls are swept up inside a demon and that it doesn’t really matter anyway.

 

He could reap thousands of lost souls and there still would be a tug, another one waiting to pull him towards itself and set it free.

 

His mentor told Oikawa that it was pointless work, a waste of valuable reapers to send them to clean out the ocean, the chances of anyone ever encountering the distorted souls lurking in the depths small enough to be dismissed. He said that the reapers that do make the choice to tackle the most difficult souls there are usually do so out of a sense of self-punishment. It wasn't something he understood very well, his own suicide had been a thing of desperation, the only way to save his family from crushing debt.

 

Climbing over the wreckage of a ship that was supposed to take those aboard to a better life Oikawa thinks he understands self-punishment perfectly.

 

*

 

There is a whole lot of nothing between reapings, which gives him more time to think than he has ever had or wanted before. And after going through every movie and mentally replaying every match he’s ever been in he’s left with no choice but to think about how he ended up here.

 

He doesn’t regret dying, not even when it wasn’t as permanent as he had expected. He had never talked about how he felt in the years leading up to it, not with a therapist and sure as fuck not with his parents, but he’d done his research. If you bothered looking the internet was full of places where people went to plan their deaths, to debate the best way to do it. He’d made pro-con lists for all of them.

 

Perhaps the clearest memory he has is of holding the knife over his wrist, the small spark of fear at how much it would hurt, the relief when there was no going back anymore.

 

He rubs his fingers over the scars, a neat pink line and it’s slightly more jagged twin. He could probably get rid of them, especially since looking at them for too long made him go light headed in a very familiar way. If he focussed on them for too long he could still feel the blood sliding warm over his cooling fingers. It was comforting, in a twisted way.

 

He had made it to eighteen. Only eighteen most people had said in the condolence cards sent to his family. He considered it nothing short of a miracle that he had made it that far.

 

*

 

Of course the miracle had been Iwa-chan, because everything about himself that Oikawa had deemed remotely worth anything began and ended with Iwa-chan.

 

They grew up together, becoming friends perhaps only because they lived next to each other, but forging those fragile bonds into something stronger over catching bugs and getting lost in the woods for a few hours, sleepovers and field trips, watching movies and matches, volleyball practice and the haphazard patching up of the injuries that came with it, trying out for a team together and becoming an almost unbeatable combination, fighting and making up, whispered confessions and stolen kisses.

 

Shortly after he became a reaper he learned what happened if he spent time with people who had known him, which is exactly why he did it. Had thought it better for Iwa-chan to have no memory of him at all than to ever have the smallest thought that he hadn’t done enough, been enough to keep his best friend alive. Oikawa had lived with guilt and the darkest thoughts anyone could have clouding everything else, and if he could keep anyone else from feeling that way he would damn well do it.

 

He had kept tabs on Iwa-chan, from a distance and despite the very vocal disagreement from his mentor. He had to make sure that he was happy, that getting rid of his memories of Oikawa hadn’t changed him in some major way.

 

Iwa-chan graduated high school with all his other friends but instead of going to college like they had planned he signed up for the police academy. Which was fine, Iwa-chan was a caring and protective soul, the force suited him much more than the life of a salaryman. A week before Oikawa stepped into the water Iwa-chan had become a full fledged police officer.

 

It was stupid, Oikawa _knew_ it was stupid, which made him feel even worse. He had gone through records and statistics with an obsessiveness that he used to reserve for lost matches and alien sightings. The chances of a cop getting killed in the field were slim in Japan, even more so for one in their hometown, but he couldn’t bear the thought of having to reap his best friend.

 

The closest reaper would probably kick his ass for leaving her with another city to take care of. He cranes his neck to look up, as if there would be anything other than black water there, but he imagines he could see the stars more clearly than anywhere else.

 

He’d just have to believe in Iwa-chan, the way he had always done, that he’ll take care of himself.

 

He felt out the direction of the soul tugging at him now and turned around to walk in the other direction. If he kept walking this way long enough he’d find land eventually and then he’d make his way back to his hometown and pack up his few belongings and move somewhere else, possibly his mentor’s old apartment, and start over.

 

He has a duty to fulfill and a reaper to buy a drink.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday


End file.
